When Life Gives You Tangerines Episode 6 Recap

Who's in the cast:
IU as Oh Ae-sun (young)
Park Bo-gum as Yang Gwan-sik (young)
Moon So-ri as Oh Ae-sun (older)
IU as Yang Geum-myeong
Yeom Hye-ran as Jeon Gwang-rye
Uhm Ji-won as Na Min-ok (special appearance)
Oh Jung-se as Yeom Byeong-cheol (special appearance)
Lee Jun-young as Park Yeong-beom

In the summer of 1978 on Jeju, the island off Korea's south coast, the scene that closed the last episode returns. Oh Ae-sun and Yang Gwan-sik are out on their new boat, taking stock. They own a house and a boat, which seems crazy. He asks if she is happy, and she says she is. Their daughter's narration warns that this was the brightest season of their lives, and that it would never come back. Then the title card: Life Goes On and On.

Dong-myeong goes missing

A caption names Ae-sun deputy chief of the Hallim disaster relief effort. Handing out tins of baby formula, she adds two extra, because a deputy chief should live up to her title. At home she scolds one of her little boys for wanting candy before he finishes his sujebi, a hand-torn dough soup. He asks his mother for a hug. Before it happens, someone runs in shouting that her daughter, Yang Geum-myeong, has been in an accident. Ae-sun asks a neighbor she calls auntie to watch the children and runs.

Geum-myeong has been hit by a motorcycle while out on her bike. Someone calls it not even a big accident, and she insists it hit her, not the other way round. An adult scolds her for cycling when wild dolphins mean a storm is on its way. When Ae-sun gets home, the neighbor has no idea which children she means. The boys are gone, and so are their shoes.

The search starts at once, with someone heading for the cabbage field. A woman arrives with Yang Eun-myeong, the older boy, whom she found alone on the seawall looking for his mother. Ae-sun scolds him and asks about the youngest. Eun-myeong says his little brother, Yang Dong-myeong, is at home, which only frightens her more. She sends Geum-myeong to telephone the fishing co-op office.

Gwan-sik is at work on a retaining wall when someone shouts his name. Soon the whole village is out calling for Dong-myeong. Someone begs for mercy and for the child to be spared; another voice pleads for a grandson. Geum-myeong's narration notes that every parent who loses a child says it happened in a blink.

When the boy is found, someone calls Ae-sun's name and says they need the hospital. She says her baby is cold, asks why no one will call an ambulance, and calls for a doctor. On the day their world fell in, the narration says, the man the family calls Steelheart broke for the first time. His weeping is louder than the waves.

Three days to mourn

Afterward, Ae-sun says she should have hugged him. The boy she fed at lunch, the narration says, was not the same boy by dinner. At the funeral, Grandma, as Geum-myeong calls her, lays no blame on Ae-sun. She says only that a mother who loses a child cries more than the sea. Ae-sun is told she still has two children to feed, and that life goes on if you keep living.

A memory of her mother, Jeon Gwang-rye, gives the advice teeth. Gwang-rye, a haenyeo, one of Jeju's women free-divers, tells her daughter that a diver who has nearly drowned again and again finds a reason to live every time. When life feels unbearable, she says, do not lie still. Stomp the blankets clean, plow the field, take odd jobs, and kick hard until you break the surface and breathe. "Your mind can't weep if your body is weary."

At home, Ae-sun offers Eun-myeong a treat he has been craving, but he will not speak to her. A caption marks school support fees due by the 20th, and Ae-sun asks why Geum-myeong never showed her perfect scores. When Ae-sun asks whether her daughter is angry because she did not bring her brother back, Geum-myeong breaks. She was told not to ride in the typhoon, she says, and went anyway, leaving her brother behind, so his death is her fault. The apologies that follow end with Eun-myeong's name. Geum-myeong's narration says that was when her parents came to their senses.

Gwan-sik gets up after three days, eats a mountain of rice and goes back to sea. He tells Geum-myeong to let her teacher know the fees will be paid in three days. Three days, the narration notes, is all the mourning they are allowed. He promises a child summer brown croakers, not for sale this time but for the family to eat together that night.

The sea that keeps giving

At the market, Ae-sun sells with her back to the sea. Someone watching says she cannot stand how calm and clear the water looks, as if nothing happened. The same water has claimed both her parents and now a child. Yet the Dragon King, the sea god, keeps handing her something new, as though he will not let her die. Gwan-sik arrives with a longtooth grouper that could fetch 1,000 won, enough for a new backpack for Eun-myeong. Ae-sun calls it unfair.

Gwan-sik asks her to stop crying for the children's sake, since they will grow anxious watching their parents weep. Ae-sun wants the summer over. It is too bright when it shines and a flood when it rains, she says, and it shows a beginner no mercy. The narration answers that grass flattened by a typhoon stands up again once the sun comes back.

Then she confesses. Since Dong-myeong turned one, she has carried him to the seawall to greet Gwan-sik. She taught the children that if they waited there, rain or wind, Dad would come home. She believes her son died because of her. Gwan-sik blames the heavens and the Dragon King and tells her nobody in the family is at fault. The narration adds that her father did resent someone, and that her mother only found out who 30 years later.

Thirty years later, at the clinic

Thirty years later, at an endoscopy center, the older Ae-sun tells the grown Geum-myeong what Gwan-sik mumbled during the procedure. "I shouldn't have gone to build the retaining wall." Once something gets into a heart of steel like his, Ae-sun says, it never gets out. Asked how they both kept going, she points to two children with bright eyes who were watching them. Geum-myeong supposes the children saved them, and Ae-sun agrees.

A death certificate fills the screen. Yang Dong-myeong, son of the head of household Yang Gwan-sik, was born September 6, 1974. He was 3 years old, which fits a storm in the summer of 1978. The narration adds that her father had nowhere to cry openly.

A village that feeds them

Back in the village, someone is told that dalgona, the honeycomb toffee, is not a meal. The answer is that food arrives every day, meat included. Geum-myeong's narration credits the people who fed them: a canola flower never blooms alone, and one life can need a whole village to save it. Even a hen's first eggs are sent over for strength.

A rice-jar mystery is settled. Back when Ae-sun was pregnant and the family numbered three, her empty rice jar filled a little more every morning, always exactly enough for three. She is told the giver knew an open handout would be refused. Someone also keeps bringing octopus for Gwang-rye's memorial rites. A voice adds that no haenyeo dives alone: in dark water you stay close to others, and a hundred miles feel like ten.

A flashback answers another mystery from episode 4. Hong Gyeong-ja, one of the haenyeo, agrees to pass something along to Gwang-rye's daughter, who is about to give birth. Na Min-ok, the woman Ae-sun's stepfather married after Gwang-rye, asks for a card that says moral scholarship. It comes out as Mo O-ran Scholarship, 10,000 won: three months' rent for the young family.

Ae-sun's stepfather, Yeom Byeong-cheol, wants to know why Min-ok paid. She admits she ruined Ae-sun's teenage years and calls the money a sly way of making up for it. He boasts that he gave Ae-sun the cabbage field. Min-ok calls it a field of rocks that Ae-sun's small hands plowed, and one her mother owned in the first place. She says even he should have paid for Ae-sun's college, and he blusters that he would pay now, loan or no loan.

Geum-myeong goes to Seoul

Years on, Geum-myeong is old enough for university. She comes home asking who could possibly get in if she did not, and shows an admission certificate from Seoul National University, Korea's top university, with her name on it. Someone shouts that they should sell the boat. Ae-sun hesitates, saying she never thought she would say this again. Asked whether she is happy, she answers that she is, beyond words.

Near campus, past signs for cheap boarding rooms, a man asks whether their child is called Geum-myeong. Someone in his family shares the name, he says, and he turns out to be Park Geum-myeong himself. At a gathering under a Yalashang Film Club card, the two groups trade cameras for group photos, and the man's son takes one more shot.

Later, Gwan-sik announces that he never liked that punk, because the boy zoomed in on Geum-myeong for a solo picture. He wants Ae-sun to phone their daughter immediately and frets that the two might have gone off to Busan. Ae-sun reminds him that he once dragged someone else's daughter to Busan himself. If Geum-myeong ever marries, she predicts, he will be on the warpath.

In a cut-away, Geum-myeong tells a young man she cannot see him off to Nonsan, the army training camp, tomorrow. When he keeps saying that is fine, she spells it out: tonight is their last night before he enlists. Gwan-sik tells Ae-sun to keep their daughter in check, because she is exactly like her mother.

The couple worry over the basement room Geum-myeong has taken in Seoul. One of them repeats her claim that nothing higher was free and asks if it can be believed. The other says she is the eldest and always worries too much. Ae-sun wonders aloud whether anyone would buy the cabbage field, and Gwan-sik refuses: if they sell everything, nothing will be left in her name.

Looking back, one of them calls those days nice and wonders whether that was the summer of their lives. It was a run of firsts, from first love to a first boat, a first full net and a first child. "That field is your reward for surviving that summer," Gwan-sik says. Life, the narration says, did go on.

Thoughts

The hour is built on the hug that never happens, and the show is disciplined about it. We see the boy ask, we see Ae-sun run, and the episode waits until after the funeral to tell us what it cost. What follows is a family in which nobody blames anybody else and everybody blames themselves. Ae-sun points to the seawall routine, Geum-myeong to the bike, and Gwan-sik to a retaining wall he keeps to himself for 30 years. The endoscopy cutaway is the cruelest and kindest choice of the episode, because it shows that Steelheart never put that weight down.

Grandma's line at the funeral, that life goes on if you keep living, gives the episode its title. Gwang-rye's speech gives it its method, and the village sequence acts it out. The rice jar that fills by exactly three portions, the octopus for her memorial rites and the haenyeo rule about never diving alone all turn neighbors into lifeguards. The Mo O-ran payoff lands as a small, welcome laugh: the mystery benefactor from episode 4 was Min-ok, undone by a garbled card.

The jump to Seoul National University arrives fast, almost brusquely, which may be the point: life went on. Gwan-sik's grudge against the son of a man who shares his daughter's name looks like the next front. And if Geum-myeong really is exactly like her mother, a basement room in Seoul will not keep her in check for long.

Previous: When Life Gives You Tangerines Episode 5 Recap. Up next: When Life Gives You Tangerines Episode 7 Recap. See every episode in the When Life Gives You Tangerines episode guide.